Not so much a visit or anniversary celebration, was it, more like one of those promenade plays that take an audience around some disused building pressed into service as a theatre. In this case an island with multiple arenas, flying machines of different sizes, and a mammoth car stuffed with gadgets.
Might leave marks on the stages, maybe not on politics.
It followed emergence of wise and almost radical words from the late David Trimble and Peter Robinson, the first regretting unionist slowness to appreciate the late Martin McGuinness, the second also appreciating McGuinness and saying his party should have talked to Sinn Féin directly earlier.
But the first man was contradictory in life. The second has sometimes followed surprise moderation with a retreat, or silence. The effects on unionist voters can only be imagined.
No life in Stormont so no Biden Stormont show. Instead the two northern universities laboured over Good Friday reflections, one of them still hard at it this week.
Having booked up Blairs, Clintons, George Mitchell, Queen’s became over-excited and created another title for Dame Arlene, for her ‘significant contribution to peace’ and/or having been the first female First Minister.
No Joe show for Derry. ‘We can all live’ without a place in the Biden itinerary, said Eamonn McCann, never likely to be mistaken for a fan of war-mongering America. But he hoped the ‘Derry representatives’ at the Belfast gathering would ‘make their feelings plain’.
The real grievance, which SDLP leader Colum Eastwood and SF MLAs should have voiced, was that the north west still lacked a fully-fledged university, ‘an original demand of the civil rights movement’, while Ulster University has a new £350m Belfast campus.
So the Biden promenade arrived in what was once Little Italy, where over-priced student accommodation beats out potential new housing.
The Clintons are doing Derry, but does their example lure other tourists? Cuts no ice with McCann, nor, presumably, with those who made the Palestinian flag, ‘Unblock Cuba’ and ‘No 2 NATO’ bloom briefly with a giant tricolour on Belfast mountain for the Biden stop-over.
Post-Brexit sourness produced British media sniping about the fun the smaller nation next door was having amid an American visit denied to them, plus wall to wall tv coverage. But re-setting the US/UK relationship post-Brexit was never going to do Britain any favours.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove fawning on Donald Trump is forgotten at home but on file in Washington. (The inner voice of proportion says ignore those Biden the leprechaun cartoons, remember other English cartoons not long ago; Orangemen of little beauty, Arlene in bowler and sash.)
Joe the SuperIrishman may have cried green tears to the heavens for caricature. It didn’t dim media enjoyment of him tipping the staff in a Dundalk sandwich bar, in front of the Oireachtas addressing his mother in heaven.
Of course not. Tourism-marketers and media managers know the appetite for corn. Today’s American president and possibly tomorrow’s, the Trump-Slayer, having a fine time; Ireland north and south would be deranged not to take advantage.
But only one face of Ireland North beamed out of the pictures. This reticence is not new, the separatism of small sects (and some thranness?) that scattered Ulster Protestant emigrants through America rather than build an urban ward-heeling machine like the Catholic Irish. Their descendants might be a waning element in today’s Democratic party. The machine helped build Biden’s career.
His speech-writers paid respect to Ulster-Americans and 80-year-old Joe had some Belfast reflection time, looking out hands in pockets beside much smaller Rishi Sunak at a huge window on the top floor of today’s Grand Central. (Not the real centre, but near the BBC.)
Sunak did that thing for the cameras of pointing away from them though what they were facing was far-off empty Stormont. And Joe? At a guess not thinking about Stormont; more likely Louth, Mayo and the campaign already begun.
